By Faisal | Published:
December 7, 2009
Another costly study to confirm the bleeding obvious:
Psychologist Sam Gosling analyzed the Facebook profiles of 236 college-aged people, who were also asked to fill out personality questionnaires. The study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, included surveys that were designed to assess not only how study participants viewed themselves in reality, but also what their personalities would be like if they had all of their ideal traits. Specifically Gosling and colleagues measured openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion and neuroticism. And when they sized up the survey results against participants’ Facebook profiles, it quickly became clear that, instead of putting out gilded versions of themselves, people’s online profiles were in keeping with what they were actually like in real life.
i don’t know about the rest of you, but i was an avid reader of the sandmonkey blog written in cairo and was extremely upset when he got hounded out of the country by the security forces – but hurrah! it seems that it didn’t take much time for him to get back on the camel (as it were) and continue to rile people all over the middle east with his witty, incisive and often mordant observations.
good luck to him, i say – he deserves our support. unfortunately, i believe the whereabouts of the courageous and farsighted iranian blogger hossein derakhshan still remain unknown. i wonder if we’ll ever see the guy again?
By Guest | Published:
September 17, 2009
This is a guest post by Al-Qanaas Al-Masri
****
Yusuf Smith, a white convert to Islam who runs the popular blogistan website under the pseudonym of ‘Indigo Jo’, wrote an extraordinary blog last week in which he states that converts to Islam who then renounce Islam have ‘no excuse’.
Writing about some western Muslim women who recently left Islam after their involvement in the Kharabsheh Sufi community in Jordan, Smith wrote:
“The theme of someone leaving Islam after coming to associate it with a particularly unpleasant or rigid variant is not new – the essay The Wahhabi who Loved Beauty gives an example from Saudi Arabia – but it’s not an excuse at the end of the day; a person may be forgiven for it if it’s temporary, but at the end of the day accepting Truth is a duty and this means accepting that the extreme behaviour of one group is not the same as Islam itself.”
Also posted in Obscurantism |
This morning I turned on my computer and was immediately confronted by a bizarre article from Bob Pitt of Islamophobia Watch. Quilliam accuses anti-BNP protestors of ‘thuggery and hooliganism’ is an amateurish bit of slime aimed at Lucy James (who has kindly written one guest post for the Spittoon in the past) for comments she made about anti-fascist protesters in a piece for Progress Magazine.
She wrote,
Last weekend the BNP’s annual shindig ‘Red, White and Blue’ took place in a small town in Derbyshire. Reports said that the number of attendees was only marginally more than the number of anti-fascist protesters who congregated outside the gate. Unfortunately, these anti-BNP protesters soon became violent – leading to a total of 19 protesters being arrested. Although it is good to see ordinary people protesting against the BNP, such protests become ineffective when they descend into thuggery and hooliganism. Just a week earlier, for example, violent clashes erupted between the English Defence League and Unite Against Fascism in Birmingham, leading to bottles, sticks and banners thrown, and brought police in riot gear onto the streets.
By Guest | Published:
August 10, 2009
This is a guest post by The Arabian Neocon and is part 1 of a 2 part report.
******************
Where to begin with all this? While I unravel the issues here I implore you, gentle reader, to persevere. It gets good. Trust me.
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is a snotty paranoiac doing a PhD at the University of Strathclyde. In his own words he is currently ‘researching the role of lobbies, think tanks and foundations in furnishing the propaganda for the war in Iraq’.
Now then, the crackpot theories of an overworked and undersexed postgrad do not usually merit much attention. But then, I discovered that Idrees has been going around compiling ‘wiki’ pages on all my friends for his new website ‘Neocon Europe’. It is the invasive nature in which he sought out that information that first brought him to my attention. The website supposedly aims to:
By Shikwa | Published:
July 19, 2009
Earlier this week, Inayat “Mr Bean” Bunglawala’s Engage wrote a characteristically stupid piece libelling Martin Bright under the headline:
“Veteran Islamophobe Martin Bright criticises MCB libel win”.
Martin was rightly upset with that slur observing:
“I object in the strongest terms to the way the insult “Islamophobe” is thrown around so casually. It is essentially a charge of racism: the cheapest of shots and utterly without foundation”.
He was much too kind. The charge was not just without foundation – it was an outright lie. At the Observer, Martin mentored the headscarf wearing Fareen Alam. And, while he was Political Editor at the New Statesman regularly gave a voice to newly emerging Muslim voices including: Ed Husain, Shiraz Maher, and ‘Umm Mustafa’ (a pseudonym).
The Engage article nonetheless made a number of lazy accusations, one of which said:
Articles here at the Spittoon tend to be quite controversial. For this we make no apologies. Normally this provokes the ire of members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, Jamaat-e-Islami and other Islamist groups, but on one particular occasion I guest posted a piece written by ‘Al-Qanaas Al-Masri’. It investigated links between the City Circle and IIIT, a group whose US branch is closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, and was entitled ‘The City Circle – Not So Moderate After All?’
This sent certain individuals into a tailspin. Not because of what was suggested by the article (none of its many critics attempted a refutation of the points it made) but because its author had the audacity to pick on moderates. These critics missed the point. The post was not a bitter attempt to blacken the name of people doing good work, rather it sought to point out to a moderate organisation that some of its allies were letting the side down.
Seth Freedman has written a great piece for Comment is Free. In it he demolishes any lingering shreds of an argument that Press TV could be described as anything other than a propaganda mouthpiece for the Iranian state. In the line of fire is anybody who continues to defend that sorry shoddy station.
When Press TV was launched two years ago, Yvonne Ridley, one of the station’s presenters, was effusive in her praise of her paymasters: “I see it as an antidote to Fox TV that will give a different perspective to the coverage that you get from the mainstream media. It’s not shock TV, tabloid TV or propaganda promoting reactionaryism.”
By Retired | Published:
June 19, 2009
I am sad to say that, from today, I will no longer be posting at the Spittoon. I’ve enjoyed being involved with the Spittoon from the beginning (all of five minutes ago) and I wish the blog and everyone involved with it the very best for the future.
الى اللقاء
George
Posted in Blogosphere | Tagged Bye bye |
